When Are Slower Than Max Speeds Unacceptable?
 

What it says really, at what point would you lovely people consider the following options unacceptably slow (please one from each section for peak and off-peak speeds).
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Any Telewest bods please do vote, also ADSL peeps, it's just in this section as it's the busiest :)

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Well, you have to allow for the usual overheads, which NTL don't, they advertise theoretical maximum of 0% overheads, which is impossible? 5% overheads are realistic aren't they?

NTL should guarantee at least 15% within the realistic maxmimum, 24/7 so I ticked 20% for both. Anything less than that, it should be ticketed you should get refunds on your bill.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

What he said :D

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Perhaps the question should be 'what is considered acceptable' rather than 'what is considered a fault'. Logically, on a 20:1 contended service, anything < 5% is a FAULT, but anything < 80% could be regarded as 'unacceptable', particularly in off-peak time.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Duly edited.

I should quantify that I've seen posts on here reporting 85% performance as indicating a fault..

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

hmm - bearing in mind some of us have had speed increases, recently, I was inclined to be charitable, here.

- 75% of 2Mb is still 200% better than the 750Kb I used to have and found 'acceptable' :shrug:

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Off-peak, 80% of Max

I would expect my isp to be capable of at least that during quiet periods.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

I would tend to agree broadly with that although a user could get less than 5% of the theoretical maximum and there may be no fault at all on the NTL side. It could be the users fault entirely, how he has got his system configured and how he is using his connection that is the problem.

Many users think that they have a right to the full 100% speed of their connection and that if they can't achieve this then NTL should improve the infrastructure so that they can. Oh, and NTL should at the same time treble the download speed, at least treble the upload speed and half the cost.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Off Peak 95%
Peak 80%
on a correctly configured machine

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

This is probably going to sound wrong and not a great help, but personally, less than 100% service i would consider a fault, as in since the start i have had never than less, generally the problems being myself.

Though in heavy areas, I'd expect off peak no less than 95% and for the isp to compensate to about 85% on-peak. If the system can't hold that much, they shold change how the system works or not over-subscribe areas, which obviously in the world of business, is not going to happen.

On the topic, Do ntl actively refuse service in areas knowingly oversubscribed (not talking about saying no to properties not on their db)? Would policy be to get as many as possible and then warn/remove the heaviest users?

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Speed is dependant on the intermediate network (outside of ntl) and the far end server. If four or more people are downloading from a server on a 10Mbit connection then they are not going to get 3Mbit each, not matter what ntl's network is like ......

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

On my 1.5mb connection i ALWAYS got the full 188k (i think that's what it was). Now that i'm on 3mb i get about 355k. For 1.5 that was 100% of the speed i should have been getting. On 3mb i'm about 20k short. I'd consider that reasonable though. I'd say 80% in peak hours is fine, and about 95% (not including overheads) is fine in off-peak.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

That's actually a point I've made a few times myself..

You can have the fastest connection on earth, yet if the server you are accessing (or any of the intermediate "hops" on the data's journery to you) is operating at anywhere near it's full capacity, you will be limited by that.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

My tick went into the 85% catagory...

The odd day here and there of slower than normal I can live with quite happily.
The problems start when you have days, weeks and in some cases months of poor speeds this is when customers start to get ratty.

Funnily though any and all slow speeds I have had have ALWAYS been with the upload and not download........

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

It depends how people are measuring their speed- for example:

- i will be happy with downing 150k on bit torrent
- i will be happy with 300k on a reliable http download source
- i would not be happy with a result less than 250k on robin walkers test site....

Generally speaking though, i would expect a network to be able to provide 75% of the maximum during peak times and 85 at others.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Also to add to my previous post I would expect isp's that cap to have a higher performance then isp's that dont cap, so if eg. ISP A who doesnt cap manages 90% burst speed during peaks on a 2mbit connection I would expect ISP B who does cap to exceed that, as a point of capping is supposed to be to improve performance.

Re: When Are Slower Than Max Speeds A Fault?
 

Thats probably due to the fact that at the UBR there is less upload bandwidth to go around than download bandwidth, and if your UBR is oversubscribed and everyone is uploading (which you invariably do, even with web browsing) then the speeds should average out around the users. Someone will, of course, correct me if Im wrong.